


245. bones

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [287]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-10-18 08:26:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10613052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Sarah looks at Helena's scars.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warning: self-harm scars and reference to self-harm]

Helena’s back is awful to look at, but Sarah understands it’s worse if she doesn’t look. Helena is sitting with her back to Sarah, face an unknown, shoulders bowed. She’d managed enough bravery to say _I have to show you_ and then she’d given up. And here they are, Sarah staring at that bruised red criss-cross and trying to find a name for it. Trying to find words for it. Failing, mostly.

“Helena,” she says.

“I was thirteen,” Helena says, voice muffled, face an unknown. “Maggie gave it to me as a present. She showed me how to do it.”

She twists her arm around her back and presses an expert finger to the curve by her left shoulderblade, the place that would be – what, a spine? Sarah doesn’t even know how wings work. Where are the bones. The scar that Helena is putting her finger to – would that be a bone, or a muscle? Would it help her fly anywhere, if it wasn’t just a wound where Helena-age-thirteen looked Maggie in the eyes and cut down?

Sarah puts her own index finger to it. Helena doesn’t even move, so that must have been what she wanted. Sarah is usually better at it – giving people what it is they want – but she’s glad, maybe, horrible to be glad but she’s glad that she managed to find what it is Helena wanted from her. The scar under her finger doesn’t really feel like anything. Raised skin. She draws her finger along the line of it, like it’s a wrinkle she can erase.

“When I was thirteen I got my first boyfriend,” she says – which has nothing to do with the pain, except for the ways that it does. “His name was Sam.” She stops. Everything else feels terrible: that Sam was a shitty boyfriend, that he kissed with too much tongue. She can’t erase this scar no matter how much she rubs her finger along it. It won’t go away.

“Did you love him.”

“No,” Sarah says. “He just – he just wanted to touch me.”

Helena’s hand wraps around Sarah’s hand and presses it to another scar: in the latticework of her wings it’s a perpendicular line, intersecting Helena-age-thirteen, cutting Sam off partway through. “I had doubts,” she says. “When I saw their faces.”

“How old.”

Helena doesn’t say anything. Then she says: “thirteen.”

“Helena,” Sarah says, which is useless, which is nothing but a sound that hurts the both of them. Her whole palm is against Helena’s back; a bouquet of stories under her lifeline, places Helena was too young and too scared and had no one to reach for but a razor blade.

“Sarah,” Helena says.

“I don’t know,” Sarah says. “I don’t know, alright? I was thirteen, I was a shitty kid. We’d just come to Canada, I hated it, I was stupid and selfish and I kept trying to run away. Nearly failed all my classes. I threw trash in the bloody river.” She swallows. “Sometimes I tried to fold it into boats but I was shite at it and they all sunk. I just crumpled them up instead. Took less time. They were going to sink anyways, I didn’t want to—”

She’d forgotten. She used to know the folds, how to make paper rafts; in London, when it rained, she’d fold them for Felix and he’d go laughing out into the streets like the idiot kid from _It_. When she got to Canada her fingers got clumsy in the cold and she couldn’t fold them right anymore and she hated it, she hated herself, she hated how everything was changing and she couldn’t even trust her own bones anymore.

The colors bled out in the water. The colors bled red, mostly, in the water; then they faded, and left only the water behind. She rubs her fingers over Helena’s scars, and they don’t go away. They’re still there.

“Some of them floated, yes?” Helena says softly. “Pretty. Paper colors floating in the river.”

No, Sarah wants to say, no, I was telling the truth, they all sunk.

“Some of them,” she says instead.

“Good,” Helena says. Her hand is still wrapped around Sarah’s wrist, until she lets go. Then it’s just Sarah – and Helena, shoulderblade bones, voice muffled. “Tell me another story,” she says.

“Where,” Sarah says. “When.”

Silence: Helena’s breathing, Sarah’s breathing. Helena reaches around herself again and puts her finger just to the left of Sarah’s hand, a scar that could be a feather or a muscle or a bone. “This one,” she says, “is after I met you.”

“How long after,” Sarah rasps.

“Not long,” Helena says. “When you were still Beth.”

When Sarah was still Beth. Burying Katja’s body, breaking into Katja’s hotel room. Helena putting a knife up to her back. They were both different people then, surely.

“Beth died,” Sarah whispered, “only we said it was me. There was a funeral. I watched. I didn’t know if I wanted everyone to be happy I was dead, or sad, or if I didn’t want them to care. I don’t know what I wanted, isn’t that sad? Still don’t.” She moves her thumb along the scar and, oh, it doesn’t go away.

“Did they miss you,” Helena says.

“I don’t know,” Sarah says.

“I would miss you,” Helena says. Her hand has left Sarah’s hand alone again, and Sarah runs her fingers over all the cuts. Decades between some of them, or maybe just inches. Sarah can’t tell which ones are new. She touches all of them – in case her fingerprints can do something, anything.

“I’d miss you too,” she says. “You know that? Helena?”

“Tell me another story,” Helena whispers, and Sarah still can’t see her face. There is nothing there. She knows, despite that, that Helena is crying. Helena’s hand comes to her face and then away again, and there’s water on the wrist of it when she grabs Sarah’s hand and guides it lower on her back. “Janika,” she says. “Twenty-eight.”

“Vic,” Sarah says. “I was with Vic,” and she keeps talking, her hand on Helena’s scars, lifeline to lifeline.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed.


End file.
